Tag Archives: Information

Here’s a collection of some great agile books, in no particular order.

Getting Real, by the guys at 37signals. This book is good at helping you to focus on real value-adding activities. Stay nimble, stay lean, work in short sprints, react to change quickly, and celebrate your victories regularly. They have a nice way to think about prioritising high-value low-cost activities first in a project – start with the UI, it’s going to have the biggest impact on user experience, don’t spend too much time on the back-end to start with, it’s likely to change. lots more gems.

Slack, by Tom de Marco, who wrote a similar book back in the day called Peopleware. A great view on how to best manage your teams to avoid burning them out and increasing their efficiency, the answer? give them some space to do their job. 100% utilisation is madness, I’ve seen people trying to claim it’s possible to plan this and yet still be efficient. Motivated teams with space to do the best job possible will produce a better product that is far more likely to lead to further growth. The flipside is that if you stack people with too much, they end up feeling like a hamster on a wheel, with no sense of autonomy, and they leave.

Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber. One of the original founding fathers of Scrum, along with Jeff Sutherland. Essential reading for anyone interested in the subject. He does spend a lot of book trying to help you understand why scrum doesn’t work, but this is vital. In the end, it’s helpful when trying to diagnose if things don’t go to plan during a retrospective.

Agile estimating and planning, by Mike Cohn. This book goes hand in hand with the previous one, and gets into more detail on how to set up backlogs, prioritise, monitor burn-down and estimate touchdown for your agile project.